by Rick Yancey
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.
