by Rick Yancey
“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 fi
rst 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.
