The 5th Wave (25 page)

So I say, “I’m not a total fool. You’d do the same for Val.”

He doesn’t have a quick reply to that. He wraps his arms around his legs and rests
his chin on his knees, staring at the fire.

“You think I’m wasting my time,” I accuse his flawless profile. “You think Sammy’s
dead.”

“How could I know that, Cassie?”

“I’m not saying you know that. I’m saying you
think
that.”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“No, so shut up.”

“I wasn’t saying anything.
You
said—”

“Don’t…say…anything.”

“I’m not.”

“You just did.”

“I’ll stop.”

“But you’re not. You say you will, then you just keep going.”

He starts to say something, then shuts his mouth so hard, I hear his teeth click.

“I’m hungry,” I say.

“I’ll get you something.”

“Did I ask you to get me anything?” I want to pop him right in that perfectly shaped
mouth. Why do I want to hit him? Why am I so mad right now? “I’m perfectly capable
of waiting on myself. This is the problem, Evan. I didn’t show up here to give your
life purpose now that your life’s over. That’s up to you to figure out.”

“I want to help you,” he says, and for the first time I see real anger in those puppy-dog
eyes. “Why can’t saving Sammy be my purpose, too?”

His question follows me into the kitchen. It hangs over my head like a cloud while
I slap some cured deer meat onto some flat bread Evan must have baked in his outdoor
oven like the Eagle Scout he is. It follows me as I hobble back into the great room
and plop down on the sofa directly behind his head. I have this urge to kick him right
between his broad shoulders. On the table beside me is a book entitled
Love’s Desperate Desire
. Based on the cover, I would have called it
My Spectacular Washboard Abs
.

That’s my big problem. That’s it! Before the Arrival, guys like Evan Walker never
looked twice at me, much less shot wild game for me and washed my hair. They never
grabbed me by the back of the neck like the airbrushed model on his mother’s paperback,
abs a-clenching, pecs a-popping. My eyes have never been looked deeply into, or my
chin raised to bring my lips within an inch of theirs. I was the girl in the background,
the just-friend,
or—worse—the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can’t-remember-her-name
girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action
figures had found me in that snowbank.

“What?” I ask the back of his head. “Now you’re giving me the silent treatment?”

His shoulders jiggle up and down. You know, one of those wry, silent chuckles, accompanied
by a rueful shake of the head.
Girls! So silly.

“I should have asked, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“What?”

He rotates around on his butt to face me. Me on the sofa, him on the floor, looking
up. “That I was going with you.”

“
What?
We weren’t even talking about that! And why would you want to go with me, Evan? Since
you think he’s
dead
?”

“I just don’t want
you
to be dead, Cassie.”

That does it.

I hurl my deer meat at his head. The plate glances off his cheek, and he’s up and
in my face before I can blink. He leans in close, putting his hands on either side
of me, boxing me in with his arms. Tears shine in his eyes.

“You’re not the only one,” he says through gritted teeth. “My twelve-year-old sister
died in my arms. She choked to death on her own blood. And there was nothing I could
do. It makes me sick, the way you act as if the worst disaster in human history somehow
revolves around
you
. You’re not the only one who’s lost everything—not the only one who thinks they’ve
found
the one thing
that makes any of this shit make sense. You have your promise to Sammy, and I have
you
.”

He stops. He’s gone too far, and he knows it.

“You don’t ‘have’ me, Evan,” I say.

“You know what I mean.” He’s looking intently at me, and it’s very hard to keep from
turning away. “I can’t stop you from going. Well, I guess I
could
, but I also can’t let you go alone.”

“Alone is better. You know that. It’s the reason you’re still alive!” I poke my finger
into his heaving chest.

He pulls away, and I fight the instinct to reach for him. There’s a part of me that
doesn’t want him to pull away.

“But it’s not the reason
you
are,” he snaps. “You won’t last two minutes out there without me.”

I explode. I can’t help it. It was the perfectly wrong thing to say at the perfectly
wrong time.

“Screw you!” I shout. “I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone! Well, I
guess
if I needed someone to wash my hair or slap a bandage on a boo-boo or bake me a cake,
you’d be the guy!”

After two tries, I manage to get on my feet. Time for the angrily-storming-out-of-the-room
part of the argument, while the guy folds his arms over his manly chest and pouts.
I pause halfway up the stairs, telling myself I’m stopping to catch my breath, not
to let him catch up. He’s not following me anyway. So I struggle up the remaining
steps and into my bedroom.

No, not my bedroom. Val’s bedroom. I don’t have a bedroom anymore. Probably never
will again.

Oh, screw self-pity. The world doesn’t revolve around you. And screw guilt. You aren’t
the one who made Sammy get on that bus. And while you’re at it, screw grief. Evan’s
crying over his baby sister won’t bring her back.

I have you.
Well, Evan, the truth is it doesn’t matter whether there are two of us or two hundred
of us. We don’t stand a chance.
Not against an enemy like the Others. I’m making myself strong for…what? So when I
go down, at least I go down strong? What difference does that make?

I slap Bear from his perch on the bed with an angry snarl.
What the hell are
you
staring at?
He flops over to his side, arm sticking up in the air like he’s raising his hand
in class to ask a question.

Behind me, the door creaks on its rusty hinges.

“Get out,” I say without turning around.

Another
creeeeak
. Then a
click
. Then silence.

“Evan, are you standing outside that door?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“You’re kind of a lurker, you know that?”

If he answers, I don’t hear him. I’m hugging myself. Rubbing my hands up and down
my arms. The little room is freezing. My knee aches like hell, but I bite my lip and
remain stubbornly on my feet, my back to the door.

“Are you still there?” I say when I can’t take the silence anymore.

“If you leave without me, I’ll just follow you. You can’t stop me, Cassie. How are
you going to stop me?”

I shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. “Shoot you, I guess.”

“Like you shot the Crucifix Soldier?”

The words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling
open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.

“How do you know about him?” Of course, there’s only one way he could know. “You read
my diary.”

“I didn’t think you were going to live.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I guess I wanted to know what happened—”

“You’re lucky I left the gun downstairs or I
would
shoot you
right now. Do you know how
creepy
that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?”

He lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.

“You read all of it, didn’t you?” I’m totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed.
It’s ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val’s bed and realized he had seen
me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.

I punch him in the stomach. There’s no give at all; it’s like I hit a slab of concrete.

“I can’t believe you,” I shout. “You sat there—just
sat
there—while I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and
let me lie!”

He jams his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. Like a little boy busted for
breaking his mother’s antique vase. “I didn’t think it mattered that much.”

“You didn’t think…?” I’m shaking my head. Who
is
this guy? All of a sudden I’ve got a bad case of the jitters. Something is seriously
wrong here. Maybe it’s the fact that he lost his whole family and his girlfriend or
fiancée or whatever she was and for months he’s been living alone pretending that
doing really nothing is really doing something. Maybe he’s cocooned himself on this
isolated patch of Ohio farmland as a way of dealing with all the shit the Others have
ladled out, or maybe he’s just weird—weird before the Arrival and just as weird after—but
whatever it is, something is seriously twisted about this Evan Walker. He’s too calm,
too rational, too cool for it to be completely, well, cool.

“Why did you shoot him?” he asks quietly. “The soldier in the convenience store.”

“You know why,” I say. I’m about to burst into tears.

He’s nodding. “Because of Sammy.”

Now I’m
really
confused. “It had nothing to do with Sammy.”

He looks up at me. “Sammy took the soldier’s hand. Sammy got on that bus. Sammy
trusted
. And now, even though I saved you, you won’t let yourself trust me.”

He grabs my hand. Squeezes it hard. “I’m not the Crucifix Soldier, Cassie. And I’m
not Vosch. I’m just like you. I’m scared and I’m angry and I’m confused and I don’t
know what the hell I’m going to do, but I do know you can’t have it both ways. You
can’t say you’re human in one breath and a cockroach in the next. You don’t believe
you’re a cockroach. If you believed that, you wouldn’t have turned to face the sniper
on the highway.”

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “It was just a
metaphor
.”

“You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re
a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the
Others. It’s always been that way. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about
the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.”

“What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense, you know that?” I feel myself leaning
toward him, all the fight draining out of me. I can’t decide if he’s holding me back
or holding me up.

“You’re the mayfly,” he murmurs.

And then Evan Walker kisses me.

Holding my hand against his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch
feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are
having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm
and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast
to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I’m looking back at him.

I pull back just enough to speak. “Don’t kiss me.”

He lifts me into his arms. I seem to float upward forever, like when I was a little
girl and Daddy flung me into the air, feeling as if I’d just keep going up until I
reached the edge of the galaxy.

He lays me on the bed. I say, right before he kisses me again, “If you kiss me again,
I’m going to knee you in the balls.”

His hands are incredibly soft, like a cloud touching me.

“I won’t let you just…” He searches for the right word. “…fly away from me, Cassie
Sullivan.”

He blows out the candle beside the bed.

I feel his kiss more intensely now, in the darkness of the room where his sister died.
In the quiet of the house where his family died. In the stillness of the world where
the life we knew before the Arrival died. He tastes my tears before I can feel them.
Where there would be tears, his kiss.

“I didn’t save you,” he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. “You saved me.”

He repeats it over and over, until we fall asleep pressed against each other, his
voice in my ear, my tears in his mouth.

“You saved me.”

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