The 5th Wave (61 page)

And I whisper, “Mayfly.” His name for me.

He had been in me. He had been in me and I had been in him, together in an infinite
space, and there had been no spot where he ended and I began.

Sammy stirs in my lap. He dozed off; now he’s awake again. “Cassie, why are you crying?”

“I’m not. Shush and go back to sleep.”

He brushes his knuckles across my cheek. “You are crying.”

Someone is coming toward us. It’s Ben. I hurriedly wipe the tears away. He sits beside
me, very carefully, with a soft grunt of pain. We don’t look at each other. We watch
the fiery hiccups of the fallen drones in the distance. We listen to the lonely wind
whistling through dry tree branches. We feel the coldness of the frozen ground seeping
up through the soles of our shoes.

“I wanted to thank you,” he says.

“For what?” I ask.

“You saved my life.”

I shrug. “You picked me up when I fell,” I say. “So we’re even.”

My face is covered in bandages, my hair looks like a bird nested in it, I’m dressed
up like one of Sammy’s toy soldiers, and Ben Parish leans over and kisses me anyway.
A light little peck, half cheek, half mouth.

“What’s that for?” I ask, my voice coming out in a tiny squeak, the little girl’s
from long ago, the freckle-faced Cassie-I-was with
the fuzzy hair and knobby knees, an ordinary girl who shared an ordinary yellow school
bus with him for an ordinary day.

In all my fantasies about our first kiss—and there’d been about six hundred thousand
of them—I never once imagined it would be like that one. Our dream kiss usually involved
moonlight, or fog, or moonlight
and
fog, a very mysterious and romantic combination, at least in the right locale. Moonlit
fog beside a lake or a lazy river: romantic. Moonlit fog in almost any other place,
like a narrow alleyway: Jack the Ripper.

Do you remember the babies?
I asked in my fantasies. And Ben always goes,
Oh yes. Sure I do. The babies!

“Hey, Ben, I was wondering if you remember…We rode the bus together in middle school,
and you were talking about your little sister, and I told you Sammy was just born,
too, and I was wondering if you remembered that. About them being born together. Not
together, that would make them twins,
ha-ha
—I mean at the same time. Not the exact same time, but about a week apart. Sammy and
your sister. The babies.”

“I’m sorry…Babies?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“Nothing is not important anymore.”

I’m shaking. He must notice, because he puts his arm around me and we sit like that
for a while, my arms around Sammy, Ben’s arm around me, and together the three of
us watch the sun break over the horizon, obliterating the dark in a burst of golden
light.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a novel may be a solitary experience, but seeing it to a finished book is
not, and I would be a total schmuck to claim all credit for myself. I owe an enormous
debt to the team at Putnam for their immeasurable enthusiasm that only seemed to intensify
as the project grew past all our expectations. Huge thanks to Don Weisberg, Jennifer
Besser, Shanta Newlin, David Briggs, Jennifer Loja, Paula Sadler, and Sarah Hughes.

There were times when I was convinced that my editor, the unconquerable Arianne Lewin,
was channeling some demonic spirit bent on my creative destruction, testing my endurance,
pushing me, as all great editors do, to the shadowy boundaries of my ability. Through
multiple drafts, endless revisions, and countless changes, Ari never wavered in her
belief in the manuscript—and in me.

My agent, Brian DeFiore, should be awarded a medal (or at least a fancy certificate
tastefully framed) as manager extraordinaire of my writer’s angst. Brian is that rarest
breed of agent who never hesitates to wander into the deepest thickets with his client,
always willing—I won’t say always eager—to lend an ear, hold a hand, and read the
four hundred and seventy-ninth version of an ever-changing manuscript. He would never
say he’s the best, but I will: Brian, you’re the best.

Thanks to Adam Schear for his expert handling of the foreign rights to the novel,
and a special thank-you to Matthew Snyder at CAA for navigating that strange and wonderful
and baffling
world of film, working his mystical powers with awe-inspiring efficiency—before the
book was even finished. I wish that I were half the writer that he is an agent.

A writer’s family bears a particular burden during the composition of a book. I honestly
don’t know how they took it sometimes, the long nights, the moody silences, the blank
stares, the distracted answers to questions they never really asked. To my son, Jake,
I owe hearty thanks for providing his old man with a teen’s perspective and particularly
for the word “boss” when I needed it most.

There is no one to whom I am more indebted than my wife, Sandy. It was a late-night
conversation filled with the same exhilarating mixture of hilarity and fear so characteristic
of many of our late-night conversations that was the genesis of this book. That and
a very odd debate a few months later comparing an alien invasion to a mummy attack.
She is my fearless guide, my finest critic, my most rabid fan, and my fiercest defender.
She is also my best friend.

I lost a dear friend and companion during the writing of this book, my faithful writing
dog, Casey, who braved every assault, stormed every beach, and fought for every inch
of ground by my side. I will miss you, Case.

“A Singular Curiosity”

These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.

But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his
trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.

The one who saved me…and the one who cursed me.

I can’t recall what I had for breakfast this morning, but I remember with nightmarish
clarity that spring night in 1888 when he roused me roughly from my slumber, his hair
unkempt, eyes wide and shining in the lamplight, the excited glow upon his finely
chiseled features, one with which I had, unfortunately, become intimately acquainted.

“Get up! Get up, Will Henry, and be quick about it!” he said urgently. “We have a
caller!”

“A caller?” I murmured in reply. “What time is it?”

“A little after one. Now get dressed and meet me at the back door. Step lively, Will
Henry, and snap to!”

He withdrew from my little alcove, taking the light with him. I dressed in the dark
and scampered down the ladder in my stocking feet, putting on the last of my garments,
a soft felt hat a size too small for my twelve-year-old head. That little hat was
all I had left from my life before coming to live with him, and so it was precious
to me.

He had lit the jets along the hall of the upper floor, though but a single light burned
on the main floor, in the kitchen at the rear of the old house where just the two
of us lived, without so much as a maid to pick up after us: The doctor was a private
man, engaged in a dark and dangerous business, and could ill afford the prying eyes
and gossiping tongue of the servant class. When the dust and dirt became intolerable,
about every three months or so, he would press a rag and a bucket into my hands and
tell me to “snap to” before the tide of filth overwhelmed us.

I followed the light into the kitchen, my shoes completely forgotten in my trepidation.
This was not the first nocturnal visitor since my coming to live with him the year
before. The doctor had numerous visits in the wee hours of the morning, more than
I cared to remember, and none were cheerful social calls. His business was dangerous
and dark, as I have said, and so, on the whole, were his callers.

The one who called on this night was standing just
outside the back door, a gangly, skeletal figure, his shadow rising wraithlike from
the glistening cobblestones. His face was hidden beneath the broad brim of his straw
hat, but I could see his gnarled knuckles protruding from his frayed sleeves, and
knobby yellow ankles the size of apples below his tattered trousers. Behind the old
man a broken-down nag of a horse stamped and snorted, steam rising from its quivering
flanks. Behind the horse, barely visible in the mist, was the cart with its grotesque
cargo, wrapped in several layers of burlap.

The doctor was speaking quietly to the old man as I came to the door, a comforting
hand upon his shoulder, for clearly our caller was nearly mad with panic. He had done
the right thing, the doctor was assuring him. He, the doctor, would take the matter
from here. All would be well. The poor old soul nodded his large head, which appeared
all the larger with its lid of straw as it bobbed on its spindly neck.

“’Tis a crime. A bloody crime of nature!” he exclaimed at one point. “I shouldn’t
have taken it; I should have covered it back up and left it to the mercy of God!”

“I take no stances on theology, Erasmus,” said the doctor. “I am a scientist. But
is it not said that we are his instruments? If that is the case, then God brought
you to her and directed you hence to my door.”

“So you won’t report me?” the old man asked, with a sideways glance toward the doctor.

“Your secret will be as safe with me as I hope mine will
be with you. Ah, here is Will Henry. Will Henry, where are your shoes? No, no,” he
said as I turned to fetch them. “I need you to ready the laboratory.”

“Yes, doctor,” I responded dutifully, and turned to go a second time.

“And put a pot on. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I turned a third time.

“And find my boots, Will Henry.”

“Of course, sir.”

I hesitated, waiting for a fourth command. The old man called Erasmus was staring
at me.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” the doctor said. “Snap to, Will Henry!”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Right away, sir!”

I left them in the alley, hearing the old man ask as I hurried across the kitchen,
“He is your boy?”

“He is my assistant,” came the doctor’s reply.

I set the water on to boil and then went down to the basement. I lit the lamps, laid
out the instruments. (I wasn’t sure which he might need, but had a strong suspicion
the old man’s delivery was not alive—I had heard no sounds coming from the old cart,
and there didn’t seem to be great urgency to fetch the cargo inside…though this may
have been more hope than suspicion.) Then I removed a fresh smock from the closet
and rummaged under the stairs for the doctor’s rubber boots. They weren’t there, and
for a moment I stood by the examination table in mute panic. I had washed them
the week before and was certain I had placed them under the stairs. Where were the
doctor’s boots? From the kitchen came the clumping of the men’s tread across the wooden
floor. He was coming, and I had lost his boots!