The 5th Wave (23 page)

“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.