The 5th Wave (24 page)

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
fort
ified. 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.