The 5th Wave

32

AS WAYS TO DIE GO, freezing to death isn’t such a bad one.

That’s what I’m thinking as I freeze to death.

You feel warm all over. There’s no pain, none at all. You’re all floaty, like you just chugged a whole bottle of cough syrup. The white world wraps its white arms around you and carries you downward into a frosty white sea.

And the silence so—shit—silent, that the beating of your heart is the only sound in the universe. So quiet, your thoughts make a whispery noise in the dull, freezing air.

Waist-deep in a drift, under a cloudless sky, the snowpack holding you upright because your legs can’t anymore.

And you’re going, I’m alive, I’m dead, I’m alive, I’m dead.

And there’s that damn bear with its big, brown, blank, creepy eyes staring at you from its perch in the backpack, going, You lousy shit, you promised.

So cold your tears freeze against your cheeks.

“It’s not my fault,” I told Bear. “I don’t make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.”

That’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately: taking it up with God.

Like: God, WTF?

Spared from the Eye so I could kill the Crucifix Soldier. Saved from the Silencer so my leg could get infected, making every step a journey over hell’s highway. Kept me going until the blizzard came in for two solid days, trapping me in this waist-high drift so I could die of hypothermia under a gloriously blue sky.

Thanks, God.

Spared, saved, kept, the bear says. Thanks, God.

It doesn’t really matter, I’m thinking. I was all over Dad for getting so fangirly about the Others, and for spinning the facts to make things seem less bleak, but I wasn’t actually much better than he was. It was just as hard for me to swallow the idea that I had gone to bed a human being and woken up a cockroach. Being a disgusting, disease-carrying bug with a brain the size of a pinhead isn’t something you deal with easily. It takes time to adjust to the idea.

And the bear goes, Did you know a cockroach can live up to a week without its head?

Yeah. Learned that in bio. So your point is I’m a little worse off than a cockroach. Thanks. I’ll work on exactly what kind of disease-carrying pest I am.

It hits me then. Maybe that’s why the Silencer on the highway let me live: spritz the bug, walk away. Do you really need to stick around while it flips on its back and claws the air with its six spindly legs?

Stay under the Buick, run, stand your ground—what did it matter? Stay, run, stand, whatever; the damage was done. My leg wasn’t going to heal on its own. The first shot was a death sentence, so why waste any more bullets?

I rode out the blizzard in the rear compartment of an Explorer. Folded down the seat, made myself a cozy metal hut in which to watch the world turn white, unable to crack the power windows to let in fresh air, so the SUV quickly filled up with the smell of blood and my festering wound.

I used up all the pain pills from my stash in the first ten hours.

Ate up the rest of my rations by the end of day one in the SUV.

When I got thirsty, I popped the hatch a crack and scooped up handfuls of snow. Left the hatch popped up to get some fresh air—until my teeth were chattering and my breath turned into blocks of ice in front of my eyes.

By the afternoon of day two, the snow was three feet deep and my little metal hut began to feel less like a refuge than a sarcophagus. The days were only two watts brighter than the nights, and the nights were the negation of light—not dark, but lightlessness absolute. So, I thought, this is how dead people see the world.

I stopped worrying about why the Silencer had let me live. Stopped worrying about the very weird feeling of having two hearts, one in my chest and a smaller one, a mini heart, in my knee. Stopped caring whether the snow stopped before my two hearts did.

I didn’t exactly sleep. I floated in that space in between, hugging Bear to my chest, Bear who kept his eyes open when I could not. Bear, who kept Sammy’s promise to me, being there for me in the space between.

Um, speaking of promises, Cassie…

I must have apologized to him a thousand times during those two snowbound days. I’m sorry, Sams. I said no matter what, but what you’re too young to understand is there’s more than one kind of bullshit. There’s the bullshit you know that you know; the bullshit you don’t know and know you don’t know; and the bullshit you just think you know but really don’t. Making a promise in the middle of an alien black op falls under the last category. So… sorry!

So sorry.

One day later now, waist-deep in a snowbank, Cassie the ice maiden, with a jaunty little cap made out of snow and frozen hair and ice-encrusted eyelashes, all warm and floaty, dying by inches, but at least dying on her feet trying to keep a promise she had no prayer of keeping.

So sorry, Sams, so sorry.

No more bullshit.

I’m not coming.

33

THIS PLACE CAN’T BE HEAVEN. It doesn’t have the right vibe.

I’m walking in a dense fog of white lifeless nothingness. Dead space. No sound. Not even the sound of my own breath. In fact, I can’t even tell if I’m breathing. That’s number one on the “How do I know if I’m alive?” checklist.

I know someone is here with me. I don’t see him or hear him, touch or smell him, but I know he’s here. I don’t know how I know he’s a he, but I do know, and he’s watching me. He’s staying still while I move through the thick white fog, but somehow he’s always the same distance away. It doesn’t freak me that he’s there, watching. It doesn’t exactly comfort me, either. He’s another fact, like the fact of the fog. There’s the fog and un-breathing me and the person with me, always close, always watching.

But there’s no one there when the fog clears, and I find myself in a four-poster bed beneath three layers of quilts that smell faintly of cedar. The white nothing fades and is replaced by the warm yellow glow of a kerosene lamp sitting on the small table beside the bed. Lifting my head a little, I can see a rocking chair, a freestanding full-length mirror, and the slatted doors of a bedroom closet. A plastic tube is attached to my arm, and the other end is attached to a bag of clear fluid hanging from a metal hook.

It takes a few minutes to absorb my new surroundings, the fact that I’m numb from the waist down, and the ultra-mega-confusing fact that I’m definitely not dead.

I reach down, and my fingers find thick bandages wrapped around my knee. I’d also like to feel my calf and toes, because there’s no sensation and I’m kind of concerned I don’t have a calf or toes or anything else below the big wad of bandages. But I can’t reach that far without sitting up, and sitting up isn’t an option. It seems like the only working parts are my arms. I use those to throw the covers off, exposing the upper half of my body to the chilly air. I’m wearing a floral-print cotton nightie. And then I’m like, What’s with the cotton nightie? Beneath which, I am naked. Which means, of course, that at some point between the removal of my clothes and donning of the nightie I was completely naked, which means I was completely naked.

Okay, ultra-mega-confusing fact number two.

I turn my head to the left: dresser, table, lamp. To the right: window, chair, table. And there’s Bear, reclining on the pillow beside me, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling, not a care in the world.

Where the hell are we, Bear?

The floorboards rattle as below me someone slams a door. The kulump, kulump of heavy boots on bare wood. Then silence. A very heavy silence, if you don’t count my heart knocking against my ribs, which you probably should since it sounds as loud as one of Crisco’s sonic bombs.

Thunk-thunk-thunk. Growing louder with each thunk.

Someone is coming up the stairs.

I try to sit up. Not a smart idea. I get about four inches off the pillow and that’s it. Where’s my rifle? Where’s my Luger? Someone is just outside the door now, and I can’t move, and even if I could all I have is this damned stuffed toy. What was I going to do with that? Snuggle the dude to death?

When you’re out of options, the best option is to do nothing. Play dead. The possum option.

I watch the door swing open through slits for eyes. I see a red plaid shirt, a wide brown belt, blue jeans. A pair of large, strong hands and very nicely trimmed fingernails. I keep my breath nice and even while he stands right beside me, by the metal pole, checking my drip, I guess. Then he turns and there’s his butt and then he turns again and his face lowers into view as he sits in the rocker by the mirror. I can see his face, and I can see my face in the mirror. Breathe, Cassie, breathe. He has a good face, not the face of someone who wants to hurt you. If he wanted to hurt you, he wouldn’t have brought you here and stuck an IV in you to keep you hydrated, and the sheets feel nice and clean, and so what, he took your clothes and dressed you in this cotton nightie, what did you expect him to do? Your clothes were filthy, like you, only you’re not anymore, and your skin smells a little like lilacs, which means holy Christ he bathed you.

Trying to keep my breath steady and not doing a very good job at it.

Then the owner of the good face says, “I know you’re awake.”

When I don’t say anything, he goes, “And I know you’re watching me, Cassie.”

“How do you know my name?” I croak. My throat feels like it’s lined with sandpaper. I open up my eyes. I can see him clearer now. I wasn’t wrong about the face. It’s good in a clean-cut, Clark Kent kind of way. I’m guessing eighteen or nineteen, broad through the shoulders, nice arms, and those hands with the perfect cuticles. Well, I tell myself, it could be worse. You could have been rescued by some fifty-year-old perv sporting a spare tire the size of a monster truck’s who keeps his dead mother in the attic.

“Driver’s license,” he says. He doesn’t get up. He stays in the chair with his elbows resting on his knees and his head lowered, which strikes me as more shy than menacing. I watch his dangling hands and imagine them running a warm, wet cloth over every inch of my body. My completely naked body.

“I’m Evan,” he says next. “Evan Walker.”

“Hi,” I say.

He gives a little laugh like I said something funny.

“Hi,” he says.

“Where the hell am I, Evan Walker?”

“My sister’s bedroom.” His deep-set eyes are a chocolate brown, like his hair, and a little mournful and questioning, like a puppy’s.

“Is she…?”

He nods. Rubbing his hands together slowly. “Whole family. How about you?”

“Everyone except my baby brother. That’s, um, his bear, not mine.”

He smiles. It’s a good smile, like his face. “It’s a very nice bear.”

“He’s looked better.”

“Like most things.”

I assume he’s talking about the world in general, not my body.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

He looks away. Looks back at me. Chocolate-colored, lost-puppy eyes. “The birds.”

“What birds?”

“Buzzards. When I see them circling, I always check it out. You know. In case—”

“Sure, okay.” I didn’t want him to elaborate. “So you brought me here to your house, stuck me with an IV—where’d you get the IV, anyway? And then you took off all my… and then you cleaned me up…”

“I honestly couldn’t believe you were alive, and then I couldn’t believe you’d stay alive.” He’s rubbing his hands together. Is he cold? Nervous? I’m both. “The IV was already here. It came in handy during the plague. I shouldn’t say this, I guess, but every day I came home I honestly expected you to be dead. You were in pretty bad shape.”

He reaches into his shirt pocket, and for some reason I flinch, which he notices, and then smiles reassuringly. He holds out a chunk of knotty-looking metal the size of a thimble.

“If this had hit you practically anyplace else, you would be dead.” He rolls the slug between his index finger and thumb. “Where’d it come from?”

I roll my eyes. Can’t help it. But I leave out the duh. “A rifle.”

He shakes his head. He thinks I don’t understand the question. Sarcasm doesn’t appear to work on him. If that’s true, I’m in trouble: It’s my normal mode of communication.

“Whose rifle?”

“I don’t know—the Others. A troop of them pretending to be soldiers wasted my father and everybody in our refugee camp. I was the only one who made it out alive. Well, not counting Sammy and the rest of the kids.”

He’s looking at me like I’m completely whacked. “What happened to the kids?”

“They took them. In school buses.”

“School buses…?” He’s shaking his head. Aliens in school buses? He looks like he’s about to smile. I must have looked a little too long at his lips, because he rubs them self-consciously with the back of his hand. “Took them where?”

“I don’t know. They told us Wright-Patterson, but—”

“Wright-Patterson. The air force base? I heard it was abandoned.”

“Well, I’m not sure you can trust anything they tell you. They are the enemy.” I swallow. My throat’s parched.

Evan Walker must be one of those people who notices everything, because he says, “You want something to drink?”

“I’m not thirsty,” I lie. Now, why did I lie about something like that? To show him how tough I am? Or to keep him in that chair because he’s the first person I’ve talked to in weeks, if you didn’t count the bear, which you shouldn’t.

“Why did they take the kids?” His eyes are big and round now, like Bear’s. It’s hard to decide his best feature. Those soft, chocolaty eyes or the lean jaw? Maybe the thick hair, the way it falls over his forehead when he leans toward me.

“I don’t know the real reason, but I figure it’s a very good one to them and a very bad one to us.”

“Do you think…?” He can’t finish the question—or won’t, to spare me having to answer it. He’s looking at Sam’s bear leaning on the pillow beside me.

“What? That my little brother’s dead? No. I think he’s alive. Mostly because it doesn’t make sense that they’d pull out the kids, then kill everybody else. They blew up the whole camp with some kind of green bomb—”

“Wait a minute,” he says, holding up one of his large hands. “A green bomb?”

“I’m not making this up.”

“Why green, though?”

“Because green is the color of money, grass, oak leaves, and alien bombs. How the hell would I know why it was green?”

He’s laughing. A quiet, held-in kind of laugh. When he smiles, the right side of his mouth goes slightly higher than the left. Then I’m like, Cassie, why are you staring at his mouth anyway?

Somehow the fact that I was rescued by a very good-looking guy with a lopsided grin and large, strong hands is the most unnerving thing that has happened to me since the Others arrived.

Thinking about what happened at the camp is giving me the heebie-jeebies, so I decide to change the subject. I peer down at the quilt covering me. It looks homemade. The image of an old woman sewing it flashes through my mind and, for some reason, I suddenly feel like crying.

“How long have I been here?” I ask weakly.

“It’ll be a week tomorrow.”

“Did you have to cut…?” I don’t know how to put the question.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. “Amputate? No. The bullet just missed your knee, so I think you’ll be able to walk, but there could be nerve damage.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m getting used to that.”

34

HE LEAVES ME for a little while and returns with some clear broth, not chicken- or beef-based, but some kind of meat, deer maybe, and while I clutch the edges of the quilt he helps me sit up so I can sip, holding the warm cup in both hands. He’s staring at me, not a creeper stare, but the way you look at a sick person, feeling a little sick yourself and not knowing how to make it better. Or maybe, I think, it is a creeper stare and the concerned look is just a clever cover. Are pervs only pervs if you don’t find them attractive? I called Crisco a sicko for trying to give me a corpse’s jewelry, and he said I wouldn’t think that if he were Ben Parish–hot.

Remembering Crisco kills my appetite. Evan sees me staring at the cup in my lap and gently pulls it from my hands and places it on the table.

“I could have done that,” I say, more sharply than I meant to.

“Tell me about these soldiers,” he says. “How do you know they weren’t… human?”

I tell him about them showing up not long after the drones, the way they loaded up the kids, then gathered everybody into the barracks and mowed them down. But the clincher was the Eye. Clearly extraterrestrial.

“They’re human,” he decides after I’m done. “They must be working with the visitors.”

“Oh God, please don’t call them that.” I hate that name for them. The talking heads used it before the 1st Wave—all the YouTubers, everyone in the Twitterverse, even the president during news briefings.

“What should I call them?” he asks. He’s smiling. I get the feeling he’d call them turnips if I wanted him to.

“Dad and I called them the Others, as in not us, not human.”

“That’s what I mean,” he says, nodding seriously. “The odds of their looking exactly like us are astronomically slim.”

He sounds just like my dad on one of his speculative rants, and suddenly I’m annoyed, I’m not sure why.

“Well, that’s terrific, isn’t it? A two-front war. Us-versus-them and us-versus-us-and-them.”

He shakes his head ruefully. “It wouldn’t be the first time people have changed sides once the victor is obvious.”

“So the traitors grab the kids out of the camp because they’re willing to help wipe out the human race, but they draw the line at anyone under eighteen?”

He shrugs. “What do you think?”

“I think we’re seriously screwed when the men with guns decide to help the bad guys.”

“I could be wrong,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he is. “Maybe they are visi—Others, I don’t know, disguised as humans, or maybe even some kind of clones…”

I’m nodding. I’ve heard this before, too, during one of Dad’s endless ruminations about what the Others might look like.

It’s not a question of why couldn’t they, but why wouldn’t they? We’ve known about their existence for five months. They must have known about ours for years. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Plenty of time to extract DNA and “grow” as many copies as they needed. In fact, they might have to wage the ground war with copies of us. In a thousand ways, our planet might not be viable for their bodies. Remember War of the Worlds?

Maybe that’s the source of my current snippiness. Evan is going all-out Oliver Sullivan on me. And that puts Oliver Sullivan dying in the dirt right in front of me when all I want to do is look away.

“Or maybe they’re like cyborgs, Terminators,” I say, only half joking. I’ve seen a dead one up close, the soldier I shot point-blank at the ash pit. I didn’t check his pulse or anything, but he sure seemed dead to me, and the blood looked real enough.

Remembering the camp and what happened there never fails to freak me, so I start to freak.

“We can’t stay here,” I say urgently.

He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “What do you mean?”

“They’ll find us!” I grab the kerosene lamp, yank off the glass top, and blow hard at the dancing flame. It hisses at me, stays lit. He pulls the glass out of my hand and slips it back over the base of the lamp.

“It’s thirty-seven degrees outside, and we’re miles from the nearest shelter,” he says. “If you burn down the house, we’re toast.” Toast? Maybe that’s an attempt at humor, but he isn’t smiling. “Besides, you’re not well enough to travel. Not for another three or four weeks, at least.”

Three or four weeks? Who does this teenage version of the Brawny paper-towel guy think he’s kidding? We won’t last three days with lights shining through the windows and smoke curling from the chimney.

He’s picked up on my growing distress. “Okay,” he says with a sigh. He extinguishes the lamp, and the room plunges into darkness. Can’t see him, can’t see anything. I can smell him, though, a mixture of wood smoke and something like baby powder, and after a few more minutes, I can feel his body displacing the air a few inches away from mine.

“Miles away from the nearest shelter?” I ask. “Where the hell do you live, Evan?”

“My family’s farm. About sixty miles from Cincinnati.”

“How far from Wright-Patterson?”

“I don’t know. Seventy, eighty miles? Why?”

“I told you. They took my baby brother.”

“You said that’s where they said they were taking him.”

Our voices, wrapping around each other’s, entwining, and then tugging free, in the pitch black.

“Well, I have to start somewhere,” I say.

“And if he isn’t there?”

“Then I go somewhere else.” I made a promise. That damned bear will never forgive me if I don’t keep it.

I can smell his breath. Chocolate. Chocolate! My mouth starts to water. I can actually feel my saliva glands pumping. I haven’t had solid food in weeks, and what does he bring me? Some greasy mystery meat–based broth. He’s been holding out on me, this farm boy bastard.

“You realize there’s a lot more of them than you, right?” he asks.

“And your point is?”

He doesn’t answer. So I say, “Do you believe in God, Evan?”

“Sure I do.”

“I don’t. I mean, I don’t know. I did before the Others came. Or thought I did, when I thought about it at all. And then they came and…” I have to stop for a second to collect myself. “Maybe there’s a God. Sammy thinks there is. But he also thinks there’s a Santa Claus. Still, every night I said his prayer with him, and it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was about Sammy and what he believed, and if you could have seen him take that fake soldier’s hand and follow him onto that bus…”

I’m losing it, and it doesn’t matter to me much. Crying is always easier in the dark. Suddenly my cold hand is blanketed by Evan’s warmer one, and his palm is as soft and smooth as the pillowcase beneath my cheek.

“It kills me,” I sob. “The way he trusted. Like the way we trusted before they came and blew the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the street, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino! Trusted…”

His other hand finds my cheek, and he wipes away my tears with his thumb. The chocolate scent overwhelms me as he bends over and whispers in my ear, “No, Cassie. No, no, no.”

I throw my arm around his neck and press his dry cheek against my wet one. I’m shaking like an epileptic, and for the first time I can feel the weight of the quilts on the top of my toes because the blinding dark sharpens your other senses.

I’m a bubbling stew of random thoughts and feelings. I’m worried my hair might smell. I want some chocolate. This guy holding me—well, it’s more like I was holding him—has seen me in all my naked glory. What did he think about my body? What did I think about my body? Does God really care about promises? Do I really care about God? Are miracles something like the Red Sea parting or more like Evan Walker finding me locked in a block of ice in a wilderness of white?

“Cassie, it’s going to be okay,” he whispers into my ear, chocolate breath.

When I wake up the next morning, there’s a Hershey’s Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

35

HE LEAVES THE OLD FARMHOUSE every night to patrol the grounds and to hunt. He tells me he has plenty of dry goods and his mom was a devoted preserver and canner, but he likes fresh meat. So he leaves me to find edible creatures to kill, and on the fourth day he comes into the room with an honest-to-God hamburger on a hot, homemade bun and a side of roasted potatoes. It’s the first real food I’ve had since escaping Camp Ashpit. It’s also a freaking hamburger, which I haven’t tasted since the Arrival and which, I think I’ve pointed out, I was willing to kill for.

“Where’d you get the bread?” I ask midway through the burger, grease rolling down my chin. I haven’t had bread, either. It’s light and fluffy and slightly sweet.

He could give me any number of snarky replies, since there is only one way he could have gotten it. He doesn’t. “I baked it.”

After feeding me, he changes the dressing on my leg. I ask if I want to look. He says no, I most definitely do not want to look. I want to get out of bed, take a real bath, be like a person again. He says it’s too soon. I tell him I want to wash and comb out my hair. Too soon, he insists. I tell him if he won’t help me I’m going to smash the kerosene lamp over his head. So he sets a kitchen chair in the middle of the claw-foot tub in the little bathroom down the hall with its peeling flowery wallpaper and carries me to it, plops me down, leaves, and comes back with a big metal tub filled with steaming water.

The tub must be very heavy. His biceps strain against his sleeves, like he’s Bruce Banner mid-Hulkifying, and the veins stand out on his neck. The water smells faintly of rose petals. He uses a lemonade pitcher decorated with smiley-faced suns as a ladle, and I lean my head back for him. He starts to work in the shampoo, and I push his hands away. This part I can do myself.

The water courses from my hair into the gown, plastering the cotton to my body. Evan clears his throat, and when he turns his head his thick hair does this swooshy thing across his dark brow and I’m a little disturbed, but in a pleasant way. I ask for the widest-toothed comb he has, and he digs in the cupboard beneath the sink while I watch him out of the corner of my eye, barely noticing the way his powerful shoulders roll beneath his flannel shirt, or his faded jeans with the frayed back pockets, definitely paying no attention to the roundness of his butt inside those jeans, totally ignoring the way my earlobes burn like fire beneath the lukewarm water dripping from my hair. After a couple eternities, he finds a comb, asks if I need anything before he leaves, and I mumble no when what I really want to do is laugh and cry at the same time.

Alone, I force myself to concentrate on my hair, which is a horrible mess. Knots and tangles and bits of leaf and little wads of dirt. I work on the knots until the water goes cold and I start to shiver in my wet nightie. I pause once in the chore when I hear a tiny sound just outside the door.

“Are you standing out there?” I ask. The small, tiled bathroom magnifies sound like an echo chamber.

There’s a pause, and then a soft answer: “Yes.”

“Why are you standing out there?”

“I’m waiting to rinse your hair.”

“This is going to take a while,” I say.

“That’s okay.”

“Why don’t you go bake a pie or something and come back in about fifteen minutes.”

I don’t hear an answer. But I don’t hear him leave.

“Are you still there?”

The floorboards in the hall creak. “Yes.”

I give up after another ten minutes of teasing and pulling. Evan comes back in, sits on the edge of the tub. I rest my head in the palm of his hand while he rinses the suds from my hair.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” I tell him.

“I live here.”

“That you stayed here.” A lot of young guys left for the nearest police station, National Guard armory, or military base after news of the 2nd Wave started trickling in from survivors fleeing inland. Like after 9/11, only times ten.

“There were eight of us, counting Mom and Dad,” he says. “I’m the oldest. After they died, I took care of the kids.”

“Slower, Evan,” I say as he empties half the pitcher onto my head. “I feel like I’m being waterboarded.”

“Sorry.” He presses the edge of his hand against my forehead to act as a dam. The water is deliciously warm and tickly. I close my eyes.

“Did you get sick?” I ask.

“Yeah. Then I got better.” He ladles more water from the metal tub into the pitcher, and I hold my breath, anticipating the tickly warmth. “My youngest sister, Val, she died two months ago. That’s her bedroom you’re in. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out what to do. I know I can’t stay here forever, but I’ve hiked all the way to Cincinnati, and maybe I don’t need to explain why I’m never going back.”

One hand pours while the other presses the wet hair against my scalp to wring out the excess water. Firmly, not too hard, just right. Like I’m not the first girl whose hair he’s washed. A little, hysterical voice inside my head is screaming, What do you think you’re doing? You don’t even know this guy! but that same voice is going, Great hands; ask him for a scalp massage while he’s at it.

While outside my head, his deep, calm voice is saying, “Now I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to leave until it gets warmer. Maybe Wright-Patterson or Kentucky. Fort Knox is only a hundred and forty miles from here.”

“Fort Knox? What, you’re going on a heist?”

“It’s a fort, as in heavily fortified. A logical rallying point.” Gathering the ends of my hair in his fist and squeezing, and the plop-plops of the water spattering in the claw-foot tub.

“If it were me, I wouldn’t go anyplace that’s a logical rallying point,” I say. “Logically those’ll be the first points they wipe off the map.”

“From what you’ve told me about the Silencers, it’s not logical to rally anywhere.”

“Or stay anywhere longer than a few days. Keep your numbers small and keep moving.”

“Until…?”

“There is no until,” I snap at him. “There’s just unless.”

He dries my hair with a fluffy white towel. There’s a fresh nightie lying on the closed toilet seat. I look up into those chocolate-colored eyes and say, “Turn around.” He turns around. I reach past the frayed back pockets of the jeans that conform to the butt that I’m not looking at and pick up the dry nightie. “If you try to peek in that mirror, I’ll know,” I warn the guy who’s already seen me naked, but that was unconsciously naked, which is not the same thing. He nods, lowers his head, and pinches his lower lip like he’s sealing off a smile.

I wiggle out of the wet nightie, slip the dry one over my head, and tell him it’s okay to turn around.

He lifts me from the chair and carries me back to his dead sister’s bed, and I have one arm around his shoulders, and his arm is tight—though not too tight—across my waist. His body feels about twenty degrees warmer than mine. He eases me onto the mattress and pulls the quilts over my bare legs. His cheeks are very smooth, his hair neatly groomed, and his cuticles, as I’ve pointed out, are impeccable. Which means grooming is very high on his list of priorities in the postapocalyptic era. Why? Who’s around to see him?

“So how long has it been since you’ve seen another person?” I ask. “Besides me.”

“I see people practically every day,” he says. “The last living one before you was Val. Before her, it was Lauren.”

“Lauren?”

“My girlfriend.” He looks away. “She’s dead, too.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say, “The plague sucks.”

“It wasn’t the plague,” he says. “Well, she had it, but it wasn’t the plague that killed her. She did that herself, before it could.”

He’s standing awkwardly beside the bed. Doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t have an excuse to stay.

“I just couldn’t help but notice how nice…” No, not a good intro. “I guess it’s hard, when it’s just you, to really care about…” Nuh-uh.

“Care about what?” he asks. “One person when almost every person is gone?”

“I wasn’t talking about me.” And then I give up trying to come up with a polite way to say it. “You take a lot of pride in how you look.”

“It isn’t pride.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of being stuck-up—”

“I know; you’re thinking what’s the point now?”

Well, actually, I was hoping the point was me. But I don’t say anything.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “But it’s something I can control. It gives structure to my day. It makes me feel more…” He shrugs. “More human, I guess.”

“And you need help with that? Feeling human?”

He looks at me funny, then gives me something to think about for a long time after he leaves:

“Don’t you?”

36

HE’S GONE MOST of the nights. During the days he waits on me hand and foot, so I don’t know when the guy sleeps. By the second week, I was about to go nuts cooped up in the little upstairs bedroom, and on a day when the temperature climbed above freezing, he helped me into some of Val’s clothes, averting his eyes at the appropriate moments, and carried me downstairs to sit on the front porch, throwing a big wool blanket over my lap. He left me there and came back with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate. I can’t say much about the view. Brown, lifeless, undulating earth, bare trees, a gray, featureless sky. But the cold air felt good against my cheeks, and the hot chocolate was the perfect temperature.

We don’t talk about the Others. We talk about our lives before the Others. He was going to study engineering at Kent State after graduating. He had offered to stay on the farm for a couple years, but his father insisted that he go to college. He had known Lauren since the fourth grade, started dating her in their sophomore year. There was talk of marriage. He noticed I got quiet when Lauren came up. Like I said, Evan is a noticer.

“How about you?” he asked. “Did you have a boyfriend?”

“No. Well, kind of. His name was Ben Parish. I guess you could say he had this thing for me. We dated a couple of times. You know, casually.”

I wonder what made me lie to him. He doesn’t know Ben Parish from a hole in the ground. Which is kind of the same way Ben knew me. I swirled the remains of my hot chocolate and avoided his eyes.

The next morning he showed up at my bedside with a crutch carved from a single piece of wood. Sanded to a glossy finish, lightweight, the perfect height. I took one look at it and demanded that he name three things he isn’t good at.

“Roller skating, singing, and talking to girls.”

“You left out stalking,” I told him as he helped me out of the bed. “I can always tell when you’re lurking around corners.”

“You only asked for three.”

I’m not going to lie: My rehab sucked. Every time I put weight on my leg, pain shot up the left side of my body, my knee buckled, and the only things that kept me from falling flat on my ass were Evan’s strong arms.

But I kept at it during that long day and the long days that followed. I was determined to get strong. Stronger than before the Silencer cut me down and abandoned me to die. Stronger than I was in my little hideout in the woods, rolled up in my sleeping bag, feeling sorry for myself while Sammy was suffering God knows what. Stronger than the days at Camp Ashpit, where I walked around with a huge chip on my shoulder, angry at the world for being what the world was, for what it had always been: a dangerous place that our human noise had made seem a whole lot safer.

Three hours of rehab in the morning. Thirty-minute break for lunch. Then three more hours of rehab in the afternoon. Working on rebuilding my muscles until I felt them melt into a sweaty, jellylike mass.

But I still wasn’t done for the day. I asked Evan what happened to my Luger. I had to get over my fear of guns. And my accuracy sucked. He showed me the proper grip, how to use the sight. He set up empty gallon-size paint cans on the fence posts for targets, replacing those with smaller cans as my aim improved. I ask him to take me hunting with him—I need to get used to hitting a moving, breathing target—but he refuses. I’m still pretty weak, I can’t even run yet, and what happens if a Silencer spots us?

We take walks at sunset. At first I didn’t make it more than half a mile before my leg gave out and Evan had to carry me back to the farmhouse. But each day I was able to go a hundred yards farther than the day before. A half mile became three-quarters became a whole. By the second week I was doing two miles without stopping. Can’t run yet, but my pace and stamina have vastly improved.

Evan stays with me through dinner and a couple hours into the night, and then he shoulders his rifle and tells me he’ll be back before sunrise. I’m usually asleep when he comes in—and it’s usually way past sunrise.

“Where do you go every night?” I asked him one day.

“Hunting.” A man of few words, this Evan Walker.

“You must be a lousy hunter,” I teased him. “You hardly ever come back with anything.”

“I’m actually very good,” he said matter-of-factly. Even when he says something that, on paper, sounds like bragging, it isn’t. It’s the way he says it, casually, like he’s talking about the weather.

“You just don’t have the heart to kill?”

“I have the heart to do what I have to do.” He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “In the beginning it was about staying alive. Then it was about protecting my brothers and sisters from the crazies running around after the plague first hit. Then it was about protecting my territory and supplies…”

“What’s it about now?” I asked quietly. That was the first time I’d seen him even mildly worked up.

“It settles my nerves,” he admitted with an embarrassed shrug. “Gives me something to do.”

“Like personal hygiene.”

“And I have trouble sleeping at night,” he went on. Wouldn’t look at me. Not looking at anything, really. “Well. Sleeping period. So after a while I gave up trying and started sleeping during the day. Or trying to. The fact is I only sleep two or three hours a day.”

“You must be really tired.”

He finally looked at me, and there was something sad and desperate in his eyes.

“That’s the worst part,” he said softly. “I’m not. I’m not tired at all.”

I was still uneasy about his disappearing at night, so once I tried to follow him. Bad idea. I lost him after ten minutes, got worried I’d get lost, turned to go back, and found myself staring up into his face.

He didn’t get mad. Didn’t accuse me of not trusting him. He just said, “You shouldn’t be out here, Cassie,” and escorted me inside.

More out of concern for my mental health than our personal safety (I don’t think he was completely sold on the whole Silencer idea), he hung heavy blankets over the windows in the great room downstairs so we could have a fire and light a couple of lamps. I waited there until he returned from his forays in the dark, sleeping on the big leather sofa or reading one of his mom’s battered paperback romance novels with the buffed-out, half-naked guys on the covers and the ladies dressed in full-length ball gowns caught in midswoon. Then around three in the morning he would come home, and we’d throw some more wood on the fire and talk. He doesn’t like to talk about his family much (when I asked about his mother’s taste in books, he just shrugged and said she liked literature). He steers the conversation back to me when things start getting too personal. Mostly he wants to talk about Sammy, as in how I plan to keep my promise to him. Since I have no idea how I’m going to do that, the discussion never ends well. I’m vague; he presses for specifics. I’m defensive; he’s insistent. Finally I get mean, and he shuts down.

“So walk me through this again,” he says late one night after going around and around for an hour. “You don’t know exactly who or what they are, but you know they have lots of heavy artillery and access to alien weaponry. You don’t know where they’ve taken your brother, but you’re going there to rescue him. Once you get there, you don’t know how you’re going to rescue him, but—”

“What is this?” I ask. “Are you trying to help or make me feel stupid?”

We’re sitting on the big fluffy rug in front of the fireplace, his rifle on one side, my Luger on the other, and the two of us in between.

He holds up his hands in a fake gesture of surrender. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“I’m starting at Camp Ashpit and picking up the trail from there,” I say for about the thousandth time. I think I know why he keeps asking the same questions, but he’s so damned obtuse, it’s hard to pin him down. Of course, he could say the same thing about me. As plans go, mine is more of a general goal pretending to be a plan.

“And if you can’t pick up the trail?” he asks.

“I won’t give up until I do.”

He’s nodding a nod that says, I’m nodding, but I’m not nodding because I think what you’re saying makes sense. I’m nodding because I think you’re a total fool and I don’t want you to go all kung fu on me with a crutch I made with my own hands.

So I say, “I’m not a total fool. You’d do the same for Val.”

He doesn’t have a quick reply to that. He wraps his arms around his legs and rests his chin on his knees, staring at the fire.

“You think I’m wasting my time,” I accuse his flawless profile. “You think Sammy’s dead.”

“How could I know that, Cassie?”

“I’m not saying you know that. I’m saying you think that.”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“No, so shut up.”

“I wasn’t saying anything. You said—”

“Don’t… say… anything.”

“I’m not.”

“You just did.”

“I’ll stop.”

“But you’re not. You say you will, then you just keep going.”

He starts to say something, then shuts his mouth so hard, I hear his teeth click.

“I’m hungry,” I say.

“I’ll get you something.”

“Did I ask you to get me anything?” I want to pop him right in that perfectly shaped mouth. Why do I want to hit him? Why am I so mad right now? “I’m perfectly capable of waiting on myself. This is the problem, Evan. I didn’t show up here to give your life purpose now that your life’s over. That’s up to you to figure out.”

“I want to help you,” he says, and for the first time I see real anger in those puppy-dog eyes. “Why can’t saving Sammy be my purpose, too?”

His question follows me into the kitchen. It hangs over my head like a cloud while I slap some cured deer meat onto some flat bread Evan must have baked in his outdoor oven like the Eagle Scout he is. It follows me as I hobble back into the great room and plop down on the sofa directly behind his head. I have this urge to kick him right between his broad shoulders. On the table beside me is a book entitled Love’s Desperate Desire. Based on the cover, I would have called it My Spectacular Washboard Abs.

That’s my big problem. That’s it! Before the Arrival, guys like Evan Walker never looked twice at me, much less shot wild game for me and washed my hair. They never grabbed me by the back of the neck like the airbrushed model on his mother’s paperback, abs a-clenching, pecs a-popping. My eyes have never been looked deeply into, or my chin raised to bring my lips within an inch of theirs. I was the girl in the background, the just-friend, or—worse—the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can’t-remember-her-name girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action figures had found me in that snowbank.

“What?” I ask the back of his head. “Now you’re giving me the silent treatment?”

His shoulders jiggle up and down. You know, one of those wry, silent chuckles, accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. Girls! So silly.

“I should have asked, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“What?”

He rotates around on his butt to face me. Me on the sofa, him on the floor, looking up. “That I was going with you.”

“What? We weren’t even talking about that! And why would you want to go with me, Evan? Since you think he’s dead?”

“I just don’t want you to be dead, Cassie.”

That does it.

I hurl my deer meat at his head. The plate glances off his cheek, and he’s up and in my face before I can blink. He leans in close, putting his hands on either side of me, boxing me in with his arms. Tears shine in his eyes.

“You’re not the only one,” he says through gritted teeth. “My twelve-year-old sister died in my arms. She choked to death on her own blood. And there was nothing I could do. It makes me sick, the way you act as if the worst disaster in human history somehow revolves around you. You’re not the only one who’s lost everything—not the only one who thinks they’ve found the one thing that makes any of this shit make sense. You have your promise to Sammy, and I have you.”

He stops. He’s gone too far, and he knows it.

“You don’t ‘have’ me, Evan,” I say.

“You know what I mean.” He’s looking intently at me, and it’s very hard to keep from turning away. “I can’t stop you from going. Well, I guess I could, but I also can’t let you go alone.”

“Alone is better. You know that. It’s the reason you’re still alive!” I poke my finger into his heaving chest.

He pulls away, and I fight the instinct to reach for him. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want him to pull away.

“But it’s not the reason you are,” he snaps. “You won’t last two minutes out there without me.”

I explode. I can’t help it. It was the perfectly wrong thing to say at the perfectly wrong time.

“Screw you!” I shout. “I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone! Well, I guess if I needed someone to wash my hair or slap a bandage on a boo-boo or bake me a cake, you’d be the guy!”

After two tries, I manage to get on my feet. Time for the angrily-storming-out-of-the-room part of the argument, while the guy folds his arms over his manly chest and pouts. I pause halfway up the stairs, telling myself I’m stopping to catch my breath, not to let him catch up. He’s not following me anyway. So I struggle up the remaining steps and into my bedroom.

No, not my bedroom. Val’s bedroom. I don’t have a bedroom anymore. Probably never will again.

Oh, screw self-pity. The world doesn’t revolve around you. And screw guilt. You aren’t the one who made Sammy get on that bus. And while you’re at it, screw grief. Evan’s crying over his baby sister won’t bring her back.

I have you. Well, Evan, the truth is it doesn’t matter whether there are two of us or two hundred of us. We don’t stand a chance. Not against an enemy like the Others. I’m making myself strong for… what? So when I go down, at least I go down strong? What difference does that make?

I slap Bear from his perch on the bed with an angry snarl. What the hell are you staring at? He flops over to his side, arm sticking up in the air like he’s raising his hand in class to ask a question.

Behind me, the door creaks on its rusty hinges.

“Get out,” I say without turning around.

Another creeeeak. Then a click. Then silence.

“Evan, are you standing outside that door?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“You’re kind of a lurker, you know that?”

If he answers, I don’t hear him. I’m hugging myself. Rubbing my hands up and down my arms. The little room is freezing. My knee aches like hell, but I bite my lip and remain stubbornly on my feet, my back to the door.

“Are you still there?” I say when I can’t take the silence anymore.

“If you leave without me, I’ll just follow you. You can’t stop me, Cassie. How are you going to stop me?”

I shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. “Shoot you, I guess.”

“Like you shot the Crucifix Soldier?”

The words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.

“How do you know about him?” Of course, there’s only one way he could know. “You read my diary.”

“I didn’t think you were going to live.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I guess I wanted to know what happened—”

“You’re lucky I left the gun downstairs or I would shoot you right now. Do you know how creepy that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?”

He lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.

“You read all of it, didn’t you?” I’m totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed. It’s ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val’s bed and realized he had seen me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.

I punch him in the stomach. There’s no give at all; it’s like I hit a slab of concrete.

“I can’t believe you,” I shout. “You sat there—just sat there—while I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and let me lie!”

He jams his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. Like a little boy busted for breaking his mother’s antique vase. “I didn’t think it mattered that much.”

“You didn’t think…?” I’m shaking my head. Who is this guy? All of a sudden I’ve got a bad case of the jitters. Something is seriously wrong here. Maybe it’s the fact that he lost his whole family and his girlfriend or fiancée or whatever she was and for months he’s been living alone pretending that doing really nothing is really doing something. Maybe he’s cocooned himself on this isolated patch of Ohio farmland as a way of dealing with all the shit the Others have ladled out, or maybe he’s just weird—weird before the Arrival and just as weird after—but whatever it is, something is seriously twisted about this Evan Walker. He’s too calm, too rational, too cool for it to be completely, well, cool.

“Why did you shoot him?” he asks quietly. “The soldier in the convenience store.”

“You know why,” I say. I’m about to burst into tears.

He’s nodding. “Because of Sammy.”

Now I’m really confused. “It had nothing to do with Sammy.”

He looks up at me. “Sammy took the soldier’s hand. Sammy got on that bus. Sammy trusted. And now, even though I saved you, you won’t let yourself trust me.”

He grabs my hand. Squeezes it hard. “I’m not the Crucifix Soldier, Cassie. And I’m not Vosch. I’m just like you. I’m scared and I’m angry and I’m confused and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do, but I do know you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you’re human in one breath and a cockroach in the next. You don’t believe you’re a cockroach. If you believed that, you wouldn’t have turned to face the sniper on the highway.”

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “It was just a metaphor.”

“You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Others. It’s always been that way. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.”

“What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense, you know that?” I feel myself leaning toward him, all the fight draining out of me. I can’t decide if he’s holding me back or holding me up.

“You’re the mayfly,” he murmurs.

And then Evan Walker kisses me.

Holding my hand against his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I’m looking back at him.

I pull back just enough to speak. “Don’t kiss me.”

He lifts me into his arms. I seem to float upward forever, like when I was a little girl and Daddy flung me into the air, feeling as if I’d just keep going up until I reached the edge of the galaxy.

He lays me on the bed. I say, right before he kisses me again, “If you kiss me again, I’m going to knee you in the balls.”

His hands are incredibly soft, like a cloud touching me.

“I won’t let you just…” He searches for the right word. “…fly away from me, Cassie Sullivan.”

He blows out the candle beside the bed.

I feel his kiss more intensely now, in the darkness of the room where his sister died. In the quiet of the house where his family died. In the stillness of the world where the life we knew before the Arrival died. He tastes my tears before I can feel them. Where there would be tears, his kiss.

“I didn’t save you,” he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. “You saved me.”

He repeats it over and over, until we fall asleep pressed against each other, his voice in my ear, my tears in his mouth.

“You saved me.”